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I'm 38 years old and own a company that has $50 million in revenue. Most people assume that I have investors, a rich uncle, and I just got lucky. All three are true. And this video is over. I'm just kidding. The truth is that I learned how to play a different game and I got really good at it. The craziest part is that anybody could copy this and do it, but almost nobody will. Do you want to learn how the game is played for some context? This is me in 2016. I was 28 years old. I bought two auto repair shops in the Philadelphia suburbs where right here and here. And then over the next 10 years, I've grown it to 35 locations. And we've got more in the pipeline throughout this whole Philadelphia region. We do $50 million in revenue. The game that most people are playing is they are looking for something that's sexy. Something like AI or, you know, software or this big tech roll up and all these different things. They want to raise money, they want to scale fast, they want to exit, they want to buy Lamborghinis and yachts and all this fun stuff that you can share on Instagram and TikTok and it gets a ton of likes and all this stuff. And the truth is that that is not reality. That is what you see and that is what clouds people's minds to what is possible. So you see all that and you think, oh, that is the definition of entrepreneurship. I have to go and I have to do this big massive thing and I have to build the next Facebook or SpaceX or Amazon and anything less than that is a failure and it's not going to work. But that's like a sliver of it. And the truth is a lot of those guys fail and you don't even hear about it because they're not announcing on Instagram that they just blew all the investors money. They just slip off and then, you know, maybe a couple years later they, they pop up with their new thing. And you never really found out what happened to the old thing, right? Well, that's a lot more common than you think. And then because most people think that that is the game, they don't want to play it. They don't want to take the risks that are required to raise money and scale this big company and have to be innovative and come up with all these new ideas. I've never had an original idea in my life. That's not the point. It just scares too many people to in action. And so the game that I learned how to Play is pretty simple. It's that there are thousands and thousands of these great businesses all around the country. They're owned by old people that want to retire. They want to get out. And guess what? Their kids don't want these things. What? Why? Because they're not on TikTok or Instagram or X as a cool business to buy. They just don't want them. Or that some of them, the business has gotten to the point that they're not making any money. It's a ton of stress. Their dad says, listen, son, I don't want you to deal with all the shit that I had to deal with. And I think it's better we just, like, shut this thing off or sell it. That happens a ton. And then they're too small or, like, whatever. They're not going to go to private equity. And so many of them just quietly close up or they. They get sold at extremely good prices to people like me. That is the game. The game that you have to learn to play is to find a niche, find something that you can get really, really good at that you have an unfair advantage in, and then you exploit it. Now, not saying to exploit people to take advantage, to get over them, to, like, steal their last two nickels that they got to rub together. No, no, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about you exploit it in the way that you find your leverage point. You find that absolutely can print money, and you just hit it over and over and over and over again. Here's my business. So in 2016, those were those first two stores that you saw that I purchased. And every year, 2017, 2018, 2019, we were just buying another store, another two stores, another on store. Starting to build the team, starting to learn systems, starting to get better at process. I was learning what my unfair advantage was. I didn't have it yet. I did not have it yet, but I was learning it. I was getting better, and I was building confidence and building belief that I could do it, do it. And then when I made this switch to really figure it out, like, I figured out, hey, this is what I'm good at. I'm good at, like, buying these things. And I'm going to show you some stories of how we structure these things, how I have no outside investors and how anybody could do this. I'm going to show you that in a minute. But this is the results. To make sure you stick with me. Here is that I grew the business in five years from 5 million bucks in revenue to 50 million in revenue, extreme growth over a short amount of time. This is not unique. Once you learn how to play the game. I have friends doing this in tons of different businesses. Senior care, junk removal, roofing, mosquito control. There's so many different ways you can do it because it's not about the industry. It's not about auto repair. Say this is like, you should go buy auto repair shops. Like in many markets, in many brands. This is not an opportunity. This is what worked for me. This is my unfair advantage. And what I'm trying to explain is that you have to find what yours is and then you continue to grow. And for a lot of people, a franchise could be the unfair advantage that you have. For me, it's within the franchise network. I've never fixed a car in my life, unless you count I changed my wife's tail light like two times. Maybe a battery or two. Change a tire. I changed the spare once. That's it. I've never done brakes. I think I've changed oil once when I was like 16. But that's not my job. My job is not to be a mechanic. In fact, most mechanics that become owners stay stuck at like one or two locations because they cannot remove themselves from the technical ability. But because I never had the skills of being the mechanic, the business could never rely on me in that way. And so I had to learn, like by a necessary of survival. I had to learn how to hire mechanics and make sure they stayed. Otherwise I would literally just be sitting there, like with my hands doing nothing. I learned how to hire and retain mechanics, how to drive customers so that we would have revenue to pay everybody. Because without all that, nothing would exist. And I mastered that. And then I did another and another and another. And then I learned that there's this whole, like, underground society within franchise networks where owners just want to sell to other owners. When a Midas franchisee wants to get out, guess who's going to sell to. He's going to try to sell to another Midas franchisee. When a Wingstop, a little Caesars, a KFC1,800 got junk. When any of these brands that are franchises, when they want to get out, they are going to look to sell to another franchisee. Why? It's easy, it's quick. There's also synergies. Often they're your friends. Like, would you rather sell to a stranger or to a friend that you know and trust is going to get the deal done? Or somebody who's going to go and tell all your employees and your key people and totally Mess your world up because you don't know them and trust them. It's so easy to do deals, and sometimes they happen fast, sometimes they happen literally over a conversation. I've closed deals in over an exchange of three emails saying, hey, I'm finally ready to get out. This is the price I'm looking for. We go back and forth and we start the docs and we get it going because we already know each other. And I don't need to do, like a ton of due diligence on these things because I have 35 of them. Like, I know how to operate them. I know what the margins are to be. I have a pretty good idea of what I can make the revenue, no matter what it's doing today, because I'm just copying and pasting and over and over and over again. And that's the unfair advantage that I have, is that I can do deals fast and I can do them well, and then when we buy them, we can turn them around. I get so good at it to the point that the franchise or sometimes they want you to do deals. This store right here, the franchisor did a business review with the franchisee. He said, hey, I'm looking to retire. I want to get out. I would like to sell my business. Do you know anybody who would want to buy it? They asked him, how much do you want? He said, $150,000. They say, okay, great, give me your P and L. They bring it to me. Brian, this guy wants $150,000, like, to buy his store. He's making $100,000 a year in profit. Do you want to buy the store? And I look at it, I say, yes, and we start drawing all the paperwork. That's it. That's like, literally one of the easiest deals I've ever done because I already knew the system. I was buying it for one and a half times profit. Doesn't that seem totally unfair? Because when you look online, guys are wanting four times, five times, six crazy numbers for sure, some of these things. But I'm able to buy a profitable store within the footprint that I operate in for one and a half times profit. Like, within 18 months, I've made all my money back. Where else are you going to get a return like that? Very, very few other places. That's so unfair, isn't it? That's the point, and that's what I'm trying to say. Once you have your unfair advantage, you can buy these things like nobody else, and you can just do it over and over and over. Again, the question is then how do you finance them? If you don't have that rich uncle, you don't have the private equity. How are you doing this? And often when an owner wants out, they're willing to become the bank. They are willing to let you, the buyer, or me, I guess me, the buyer, to make payments to them instead of the bank. It's called seller financing or owner financing. And it's really simple. Like people think it's this big complicated thing and it's like whatever. It's actually really simple. We create just a couple documents that give the seller all the same legal protections at banquet. I'm personally guaranteeing the notes. There's like collateral. If I don't pay, you know, they could take the whole business back and keep all the money I've ever paid them. Right. All that's built in there, we don't have to worry about that. For me, I'm able to make small down payments. Like I once bought a business for $20,000 down and then I made payments to the guy for 3 or 4k a month. And then eventually, you know, the thing was making so much money I just paid him off. But I like used his money, right? Like I had to put a little money into it. But then once I got it going, we just kind of saved it up and said, here, you can have it. And then we had no more debt payment. I've acquired over 20 of my locations this way. I want to say it's 27, 24. I lose track after a while. But so many deals we've done these seller financing. I've got so good at it and it's like once you see it, you can't unsee it. Once you've done a deal on these, like I could structure these in anything inside eight figure franchisee, which is like my private community. I help other people do this shit. We've done these deals in almost every industry you can imagine. Lots and lots of industries. Because the mechanism is the same, the way people view about it the same. We have different industries but like the actual way it's structured, totally copy and paste. Here's another one. I bought this store for $25,000 down and over the last two years, in January 24th to December 31st, it's made $200,000 and I bought it for $25,000 down, out of pocket. And I'm making payments to the seller every month. 75 year old lady wanted to retire, trusted me as her retirement plan. I could have gone to a bank. I Could have gave her some big lump sum of money for this thing, Right? But she said, I don't want that. I don't need that. I trust that you're going to make payments on me. And I did. I've never missed a payment in my life to a seller, and I never will. That reputation has earned me in this private community the option to do these deals one after another and not another. And you can get these, too. This is not unique. This is not unique to just me or just Midas. Like, literally, you could do it in any single industry once you get inside of it. But nobody wants to. Nobody wants to do it this way. Everybody wants a shortcut. You see these stats of like online gambling. All these people throwing money and money and money after they're trying to win the next big bet, Right? How long a press conference is going to be? Is Trump going to say China more than X number of times in a thing? Like, people just want to gamble their lives away. Sports Betty, all this crap. But this is the way to get rich. That I've gotten rich is not that this is a long way. You have to be willing to eat for years while this thing builds. You saw my graph back there. It took a long time to get into it. And that so many of our profit dollars just goes back into this thing. I'm not out there buying Lambos and all this stuff. Could I? Yeah. Am I going to. No. Because I'd rather buy another 10 stores that make me a bunch of money, and then I can buy more Lambos. There's this delayed gratification and compound effect when you reinvest back into your business. And if you truly could have a business that becomes a money machine, why would you do anything else? I had a store that I put $50,000 down that made 400 grand in the next 12 months. That's an 800% return. Why the heck would you put money into any other stock or real estate or crypto or fart coin or any. Anything else? If you could create a system that makes money in that way. But most people don't want that. It's not complicated. It's actually pretty simple. You buy stores that look like this, that have a manager's office that has a closet with a bunch of Playboys inside of it and a bunch of gross stuff that goes on in a room. And you're. You buy that and it's totally unglamorous. And then you spend a bunch of money to destroy that room with gloves and you don't touch A single thing and make it look great and hire great people and you set high standards and you deal with things like this. That literally happens all the time in our business as long as the insurance guys aren't seeing this. But because it's not glamorous, it's not fun, it's not going to be like the cool thing that gets you on some cover of a magazine. But there's a lot of money to be made in unglamorous dirty work for the people who are waiting to get their hands dirty. Because you can buy these things one after another after another because it sucks so much and the headaches are so bad that the owners don't want their kids or anybody else to deal with it and they just want to get out and they're willing to sell or finance it to you for a little money down so they don't have to think about it anymore. But most people aren't going to do this. Here's the game. You want to play this game. You want to win like I've won? Find your unfair advantage. I've had success in franchising and rolling these things up, but I have friends in senior care in junk removal and all these other things. They are also having success doing the same exact thing. They found their unfair advantage. It's not limited. Don't feel like you have to put yourself in this box. Then you. You leverage creative financing, seller financing. There's so many different ways you can find money to get deals done. The only limitation is yourself. If you have a business that prints money like mine, if I had no cash because I put it into another deal and something else in the lifetime, guess what? I could find it and just reinvest everything. Reinvest as much as you can back into the business and back into the growth and you bet on yourself. Most people are fearful they aren't going to do this. And that's what's going to hold them back. And it's going to keep them small. And then don't get distracted. Man, I've missed out on so many opportunities. I would be at 60 or 70 million this year if I didn't get distracted with some. A couple dumb mistakes that I made and I'm really going to try going forward to not do it again, but it's hard. And then do it as long as you can. The longer you're in the game, the more likely you're going to win. That's a game. If you want to create an unfair advantage, there's your playbook. I'd love to hear what you think in the comments. If you have any questions, I'm happy to answer them. And if you're interested and want to see another video in more detail of all the deals that I've done, check this one out right here.